Taco Bell Mobile App Furthers Trend Towards Payment Apps for QSRs

Taco Bell seems to have an uncanny ability to cause a very specific form of amnesia in its clientele: allowing them to remember enjoying their meal, whilst always seeming to forget its inevitable side effects (let’s call it heartburn) only a few days later.

And now, thanks to the Taco Bell mobile app, consumers will be able to go from crunch wrap craving to indigestion induced existential crisis in considerably less time.

In development for the past two and a half years, the Taco Bell mobile app is geared toward iron gutted millennials, and will allow consumers to peruse the menu from their cell phones, order, and pay- all before leaving their homes. While still in testing, Taco Bell is planning to launch the app later this year.

What makes this app particularly interesting is its ability to alert the restaurant of a consumer’s location via their cell phones, letting its employees prepare the order accordingly, increasing efficiency and ensuring a fresh meal.

The app will also allow consumers to decide in real time on whether they want to pick their order up in-store or from the drive through window. If the drive through looks too long, they can walk right in and pick it up. Taco Bell has even stated that they will be instituting a separate mobile-order line within the restaurant to further reduce wait times for the consumer.

The Taco Bell Mobile app will be fully branded, adhering to their “Live Mas” message, an apparent standard among quick service restaurants. While the sudden influx of QSR’s bringing their own branded mobile payment apps to market (Dunkin Donuts has recently updated their own app, Chipotle is planning to invest a good deal of money into theirs, and both McDonald’s and Chick-Fil-A mobile apps are currently being tested, to name a few) is promising, the fragmentation within the market may lead to issues down the road for a more widespread mobile payment adoption. How many branded payment apps will a consumer be willing to download?

According to Nation’s Restaurant News, it will be at least a few. A recent study done by NRN has found that “74 percent of consumers aged 18 to 34 say they would order takeout/delivery on a mobile device, if it were available.”

It seems that mobile payments may finally be catching on thanks to QSRs. Though one may question the benefits of consumers finding fast food even easier to access, it is undoubtedly exciting news for the Pepto payment industry.